Read Chapter 1: Data Breach at the Palace

The call came at 04:12. Jonah Reed had been in the shallow end of a dream about form-filling when his phone vibrated across the nightstand like an angry insect. He grabbed it, squinted at the screen. NAEOC Duty Desk. That was never good news.

“Reed.”

“Mr. Reed, sorry to wake you. We've got a Level Two anomaly at St. James's Palace.” The voice was young, female, slightly clipped. “Overnight access from a cleared terminal. The Palace duty officer caught it on the 03:00 sweep. Protocol says you're the on-call auditor for the South Bank cluster.”

Jonah swung his legs out of bed, already reaching for his trousers. “Level Two means anomalous, not hostile. You sure they need me physically there?”

“The terminal in question is in the Household Division admin zone. They've locked the room down pending NAEOC assessment. Palace wants it contained before the morning briefing cycle.”

Jonah rubbed his face. Of course they did. Nothing said 'national embarrassment' like an unexplained login at one of the oldest royal palaces in the country. “Fine. I'll be there in forty minutes. Tell them to keep everyone out and not to touch anything. Especially not the terminal.”

The line clicked and went dead.

---

Dawn was breaking grey and damp over London as Jonah’s NAEOC-issue electric car hummed through the empty Mall. The Palace gates loomed ahead, floodlit against the pallid sky. He’d done this dance before—emergency audits, security scares, the occasional prank by a junior clerk who’d clicked the wrong link. But those had been at government departments, not royal residences.

A uniformed guard checked his pass twice, then waved him through the courtyard. A young woman in a sharp navy suit was waiting at the entrance, clipboard clutched to her chest like a shield.

“Mr. Reed? I’m DS Cara Whitmore, Palace Security Liaison.” She fell into step beside him as he walked. “We’ve got the duty officer from last night waiting in the anteroom. He’s… shaken.”

“I’d imagine so.” Jonah kept his voice neutral. “Walk me through it.”

Whitmore led him down a corridor lined with portraits of dead monarchs. Their painted eyes seemed to follow him, accusing him of disturbing their peace. “At 02:47, the audit system flagged an active session on terminal 7B. That terminal is assigned to the Household Cavalry admin office. It hasn’t been used since last Tuesday, when it was wiped and reimaged. The officer on duty, Lieutenant Barrow, had clocked out at 22:00. His access card was in the secure key rack the entire time.”

“The system flagged it automatically?”

“Yes. Standard NAEOC monitoring protocol. The palace’s internal security system is linked to your commission’s oversight node. The login was from Barrow’s credentials.”

Jonah stopped. “But he was clocked out and his card was in a rack?”

“Exactly.” Whitmore’s expression was tight. “Which means someone either cloned his card or bypassed physical access entirely. We don’t know which is worse.”

They reached a door with a keypad. Whitmore entered a code, and they stepped into a small, stuffy anteroom. A young man in uniform was sitting on a wooden chair, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor. He looked up as they entered, and Jonah saw dark circles under his eyes that had nothing to do with the hour.

“Lieutenant Barrow?” Jonah extended a hand. “Jonah Reed, NAEOC. I need to ask you a few questions about the terminal access.”

Barrow shook his hand weakly. “I didn’t… I didn’t do it, sir. I swear. I was home in bed. My wife can confirm.”

“I’m not accusing you, Lieutenant. I just need to understand what happened. Tell me about terminal 7B. What do you normally use it for?”

Barrow swallowed. “It’s mainly for internal communications, scheduling of ceremonial events. It links to the palace’s net, not the external internet. We process visitor lists, guard rotas, that sort of thing.”

“What about access to the wider government systems? Crisis prediction models, intelligence feeds?”

Barrow’s eyes widened. “No, sir. Absolutely not. That’s… we don’t have clearance for that. The terminal is segregated. Standard compartmentalization.”

Jonah filed that away. A segregated terminal shouldn’t have been able to touch the national crisis prediction network. Unless something had bypassed the segregation. “And you last used it Tuesday? For what?”

“Rota updates.” Barrow wiped a hand across his brow. “Nothing sensitive. Weird thing is, the system said the login happened at 02:47, but the last file access was logged at 03:12. Whoever it was, they were in for twenty-five minutes. That’s a long time to be just… looking around.”

Jonah turned to Whitmore. “The room’s still sealed?”

“Yes. We haven’t let anyone in since the alert.”

“Good. I’ll need to review the terminal directly. But first, let me see the audit logs you pulled. I want the raw data, not the summary.”

---

Whitmore led him to a secure office a few doors down. A terminal was already set up, a sheaf of printouts beside it. Jonah ignored the printouts and sat down, plugging his own encrypted drive into the machine. NAEOC auditors were trained to trust nothing and verify everything. A pre-printed log was just someone’s interpretation of events.

The raw logs scrolled across his screen. Timestamps, session IDs, keypress intervals. Nothing out of the ordinary—except the simple fact that the session existed at all. Jonah drilled into the file access history.

Most of it was routine. System checks, a glance at a calendar file. But then, at 02:59, a file was opened that made Jonah’s blood run cold.

*MODEL_SUCCESSION_CRISIS_V4.DB*

Jonah stared at the filename. He knew what that database was. It was part of the Crown Algorithm—the massive predictive framework that fed risk assessments to the Privy Council, the Met, and a dozen other agencies. It modelled everything from natural disasters to political instability, flagging potential threats to the continuity of the state. Including the monarchy.

Terminal 7B was supposed to be segregated. It was not supposed to touch anything like this.

He drilled deeper. The session had not just opened the file. It had written to it. Deletion flags littered the access log like footprints in mud. Rows of data had been marked for removal, then purged. Jonah felt his mouth go dry.

He pulled up a list of the deleted entries. They were incomplete—purged data left ghost fragments, and the system’s redundancy protocols should have made full deletion impossible. But whoever had done this had known how to strip backups, how to bypass the journaling. Almost like they’d been trained in NAEOC protocol.

The ghost fragments were still readable. Jonah squinted at the data stream, parsing the remnants of once-structured fields.

*FLAG: SUCCESSION_DISRUPTION* *RISK LEVEL: HIGH* *SUBJECT: MP — [partial] — HOLDEN* *EVENT WINDOW: [corrupted] — 48H*

Jonah’s finger hovered over the screen. *Holden*. There was a backbench MP named Daniel Holden, a firebrand with a reputation for speaking his mind on the Regency Act. He’d been in the papers lately, calling for reforms to the line of succession, questioning the legal basis of the Prince Regent’s powers.

And according to this ghost fragment, the Crown Algorithm had flagged him as a *succession disruption risk*—within a 48-hour window.

Something cold settled in Jonah’s stomach. He pulled the drive from the port, tucking it into his jacket pocket. Then he looked up at Whitmore, who had been hovering near the door.

“I’m going to need to take a more thorough look at the backup protocols,” he said, keeping his voice level. “The logs suggest some data was corrupted during the purge attempt. I can attempt a partial recovery from the system’s own redundancy cache, but I’ll need to do that off-site. Remote access to the main array.”

Whitmore frowned. “That’s… not standard procedure, Mr. Reed. We’d need clearance.”

“Then get it.” Jonah stood, slinging his bag over his shoulder. “This is a level two anomaly, which means I have latitude to assess risk off-site. If whatever happened here is more serious than a prank, we need to know before it metastasizes.”

He didn’t wait for her argument. He walked out of the office, down the corridor, past the dead monarchs. His hand brushed the encrypted drive in his pocket—the half-restored fragment of a crisis model that, if his reading was correct, had just flagged a Member of Parliament as a target.

Outside, the grey dawn had brightened into a pale yellow morning. Jonah climbed into his car and sat for a moment, hands on the wheel.

*Holden*, he thought. *Why would the Algorithm flag Holden?*

The machine was designed to predict threats, not create them. It assessed risk. It didn’t act.

But the deletion pattern told a different story. Someone had tried to *hide* this flag. Someone with training.

Jonah started the car and pulled out of the courtyard, the Palace shrinking in his rearview mirror. He had access to the redundancy cache. He had a ghost fragment. And he had a very uncomfortable feeling that he’d just touched the edge of something the Algorithm—and the people who ran it—didn’t want him to see.